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As costs and damage rise, the government needs to focus on prevention and learn from First Nations.

Wildfires in the province now drive global climate change, often producing more greenhouse gas emissions than all other B.C. sources combined. Canadian wildfires in 2023 produced more GHGs than total national emissions of Germany.

But one of the most powerful reasons for action is economic — we simply can’t afford the status quo. Losses from B.C. wildfires cost tens of billions of dollars. The government reported spending over $1 billion fighting 2023 wildfires.

Yet such firefighting costs are just the tip of the economic spear. The total costs of a wildfire can range from six to 30 times the suppression costs.

For example, total costs of the 2016 Fort McMurray fire are estimated at about $9 billion to $11 billion — roughly 20 times the firefighting costs.

As wildfire conditions worsen, how will we support all the mills whose wood supply has burned? All the wineries with smoke-spoiled product? All the motels, campgrounds and restaurants emptied by smoky summers? All the Indigenous communities evacuated repeatedly? All the highways and dikes washed away by wildfire-caused flooding?

And how will we pay the increased health costs? A University of California, Los Angeles, study has linked 11 years of California wildfire smoke to more than 50,000 premature deaths and $400 billion in economic impact.

Between Sept. 1, 2023, and Aug. 31, 2024, more than 300 COVID-19 outbreaks were declared at Alberta Health Services and Covenant Health acute care facilities throughout the province, according to data from AHS obtained through a freedom of information request.

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Dr. Joe Vipond, an emergency physician in Calgary and co-founder of the Canadian COVID Society, said it is worrisome that patients are being harmed and that steps aren’t taken to adequately protect them.

“The reality is that people are dying from COVID in our hospitals, and we really are doing very little to prevent them getting ill and getting infected,” Vipond said. “And we wouldn’t do the same for any other infectious disease.”

“We have sporadic implementation of protection for patients. And if I was somebody’s daughter, and my dad went into hospital with a hip fracture and came out in a casket or had some kind of long-term disability from getting COVID in hospital when we know how to prevent it, I would be very mad at the system.”

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Vipond said in an ideal world there would be an independent third-party audit of the health system that would determine what is going wrong.

“But instead, what seems to have happened is that our politicians, and therefore society, have decided that COVID is no longer an issue for anyone, and that includes vulnerable patients in hospitals.”

Smith’s government dumps a load of denial and new risks just before Christmas.

The Alberta government gave its citizens an Australian sack of “modern” coal for Christmas, as well as a load of misinformation accompanied by a mountain of disingenuousness.

In an abrupt news conference held Friday, Energy Minister Brian Jean and Environment Minister Rebecca Schulz declared the government was changing mining policy for Alberta because the world needed more metallurgical coal.

“It’s a big day,” said Jean, who has been lobbied relentlessly by the Coal Association of Canada and Australian billionaire and mining magnate Gina Rinehart to support coal mining in the Rockies.

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During the conference, neither Jean nor Schulz made any reference to what the public really wants. Repeated surveys have consistently shown that most Albertans don’t support coal mining of any kind in the eastern slopes of the Rockies.

In fact, most believe the government’s only priority should be the protection of critical watersheds.

Jean admitted Friday that coal development in the past has been “bad,” but that something called “responsible resource development” — a catchphrase for every speculative project in Alberta — would prevent selenium pollution, a multi-billion-dollar bane of metallurgical coal mining in neighbouring B.C. and many parts of Alberta. No viable technology has currently solved this environmental problem.

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Corb Lund, a popular musician who lives in southern Alberta, described the government press conference as “an Orwellian word salad meant to calm the public right before Xmas.”

“It is all greenwashing bullshit,” Donahue told The Tyee. “It is a way to push the UCP’s original 2020 plan to open the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains to coal mining, and now we’ll make a case for it again.” He called the announcement “a farce.”

History of the tradition from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibb's_Eve

Tibb's Eve is a folk expression for a day which will never arrive. A celebration held on 23 December in Newfoundland and Labrador is also known as Tibb's/Tipp's Eve.[1]

Tibb's Eve was traditionally used in Newfoundland vernacular as a unspecified date that didn't exist. If you asked someone when they were going to pay you back the money they owed you they might answer "On Tibb's Eve" meaning that you probably won't see that money again.[17]

Eventually, proverbial explanations arose as to when this non-existent Tibs Eve was: "Neither before nor after Christmas" was one. "Between the old year and the new" was another. Thus, the day became associated with the Christmas season.[3]

Sometime around World War II, people along the south coast of Newfoundland began to associate 23 December with the phrase 'Tibb's Eve' and deemed it the first night during Advent when it was appropriate to have a drink. Advent was a sober, religious time of year and traditionally people would not drink alcohol until Christmas Day at the earliest. Tibb's Eve emerged as an excuse to imbibe two days earlier.[9]

An outport tradition not originally celebrated in St. John's, Tibb's Eve was adopted circa 2010 by local bar owners, who saw it as a business opportunity.[18] Brewery taproom owners have suggested that hosting Tibb's Eve events allow them to open up "Newfoundland experiences to outsiders."[19]

Since then, social media and expatriate Newfoundlanders have spread the tradition to other parts of Canada, such as Halifax, Nova Scotia[23] and Toronto, Ontario.[24]

In 2019, comedian Colin Hollett described the holiday this way for a Halifax newspaper: Tibb's Eve on December 23, when people drink and eat at kitchen parties and bars with all the people they want to celebrate with before spending time with those they have to. I have no idea how that isn't huge everywhere else.[27]

@[email protected] - I saw via search that you'd commented about this, so you may be able to share more :)

Karsten Heuer helped bring bison back to Banff. Facing his own end, he reflected with amazement on how nature remembers.

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Wes Olson, who spent 40 years studying and reintroducing bison in places as far afield as Alaska and Siberia, came to observe the newly freed bison in Banff in 2018. Olson had been involved in other introductions, and in every case, “it felt like we put them in a strange place. In Banff, if felt like we had brought them home.”

Almost immediately the land came to life, said Olson. “I watched a group of ravens fly over and look down at these strange beasts. They could have been hovering in mid-air, they were so shocked. Then they went to gaggle in some spruce trees where they pondered the arrival, of something old yet deeply familiar.”

Within a few days Olson observed Columbian ground squirrels gathering shedded bison hair to line their birth dens as they had done since time immemorial. “After 140 years of their absence, I found that amazing.”

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A few bulls that gambolled beyond the park’s borders were shot or relocated. The Alberta government does not recognize bison as wildlife.

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The second thing the buffalo taught Heuer was not to reduce animal biology down to its smallest pieces the way so much western science does to everything. The whole is always greater than the sum of its parts, and connections to other species matter. Animals have unexplained powers and are more conscious than most humans recognize.

A UCP government report said the province was entitled to $334 billion. Canada’s top actuary says not even half that.

Mount Royal University political science professor Duane Bratt weighed in on Bluesky with the opinion that “the Smith government will quietly abandon the APP [Alberta pension plan] when there is a change in the federal government. The APP rears its head when there are Liberals in Ottawa, and buries its head when the Conservatives are in office.”

I am not so sure. The UCP brain trust has been singularly focused on the huge sums that could become available to prop up Alberta’s oil and gas sector if it got its paws on CPP assets, so don’t expect this divisive scheme to go away any time soon.

With increased focus on gambling-suicide links in countries like Australia and the United Kingdom, and with strategizing at the federal level to reduce suicides overall, there is pressure on lawmakers to rethink Canada’s approach to GRS [gambling-related suicide]. Questions remain about whether provinces have done enough to track and prevent deaths.

Survey data released last week by the charitable research organization Mental Health Research Canada suggests 60 per cent of people at high risk of gambling problems reported that ads influenced them to gamble more.

The widespread cultural acceptance of legalized gambling is connected to viewing gambling as a personal choice, neglecting the addictive nature of the heavily-promoted gaming options and ignoring the dire financial and mental health consequences for those who become addicted — a view pushed through marketing and industry lobbying efforts.

This underlying risk seems at odds with the continued expansion and availability of legalized gambling across Canada, including legal single-sports betting in every province, two recently-opened casino resorts in the Greater Toronto Area, and more than 80 new legal online casinos in Ontario through its iGaming Ontario provincial agency.

Bold mine.

Since 2021, global auto giants including Volkswagen, General Motors, Ford and Honda — and battery-makers from South Korea to Sweden — have pledged $46.1 billion in investments, mostly in Ontario and Quebec. Canadian taxpayers have kicked in $52.5 billion through subsidies, tax credits and other funding from federal and provincial coffers.

Nevertheless, the wheels have begun to wobble enough in recent months to fuel doubts about how realistic Canada’s EV ambitions are.

Several automakers have postponed or shelved projects as consumers fret over battery range and gaps in charging networks for still-pricey electric vehicles. Battery producers facing lower prices and margins have scaled back, too.

At stake are thousands of new EV manufacturing and battery jobs, opportunities for scores of small and medium-sized suppliers, and Canada’s aim to be the critical minerals supplier to the world. A slow-down in the shift to electric cars, buses and trucks would also jeopardize plans to clean up the transportation sector, the country’s second-largest greenhouse gas emitter.